Suella Fernandes is the Member of Parliament for Fareham. Prior to her election she was a barrister at No 5 Chambers in London.
We have heard many claims and counter-claims in this heated referendum debate and weighing up the factors is not necessarily easy. For me, having worked at the independent Bar for 10 years, specialising in judicial review and public law, and now elected to Parliament as a legislator, there are compelling reasons to leave the European Union.
My main reason is not to do with economics. The issue of whether we will gain or lose economically is neutral. As the world’s fifth largest economy, the EU’s single largest customer, importing €280bn worth of goods into the UK in 2013, the home of the common law and the world’s lingua franca and with historic and cultural links to the Commonwealth, the UK is sufficiently robust to withstand any short-term uncertainty to thrive in the long term.
For me, the reason for voting leave on 23 June is about democracy, politics and choice. As a lawyer, I have seen how the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has exceeded its interpretative role and grown into more of a constitutional court, determining what the law ought to say in social and economic policy, immigration and human rights. In a whole series of tax cases, the ECJ effectively struck down national tax legislation.
As law students we were all brought up on a diet of ‘EU primacy’, ‘direct effect’ and ‘kompetenz-kompetenz’. Cases such as Costa v ENEL and Factortame were memorised and debated. But what has always disturbed me is that what was designed as ‘Supreme’ in our highest domestic courts systems has become submissive, yielding to the might of an activist and unaccountable European Court. Why should judges in Luxembourg be deciding how British taxpayers’ money be spent without any democratic or legitimate challenge?
EU harmonisation through regulation writ large has disadvantages that outweigh the benefits. The extent of regulation emanating from the unelected European Commission on financial services alone has increased ten-fold in the last ten years, raising costs and making us uncompetitive. Harmonised regulation also prevents domestic regulators from innovating new regulatory regimes, for example the Capital Requirements Directive which sets maximum capital standards, restricting the UK from applying tighter rules if appropriate. On questions such as the bank bonus tax, the financial transaction tax and the ban on short selling the UK was unable to influence the outcome of these considerable EU rules.
The strengths which make our financial and legal services so attractive and resilient do not depend on our membership of the EU, but rather our position in a global market, our responsiveness to growing sectors such as Islamic finance, sovereign wealth, the offshore Chinese currency market, carbon market and dispute resolution. Choice of law clauses in commercial contracts will not suddenly evaporate if we leave the EU. Parties select English lawyers and English courts because they trust the integrity of our legal system, established long before we were ever a member of the EU.
At the time of the euro debate, scaremongers told us that if the UK did not join the euro, then the City would collapse. They were wrong. Instead, we outstripped perceived rivals such as Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam and are competing globally with New York, Singapore and Hong Kong. It is time to defy the same alarmists and step away from the restrictions of the EU and towards more international opportunities.
As former Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Lawson said recently, the EU is a country under construction. For the common currency to work, greater political and fiscal union is needed. That signifies only one direction for the UK’s membership: further legal and political integration, more regulation and less accountability. As a lawyer, as a politician but most of all, as a Briton, I am choosing self-belief, democracy and freedom and that is why I am voting to leave the EU.